“I mentioned we’re hiring a consultant,” Tiphany began again, “that we’re going to discredit—”
“You’d have me deny it all,” Mrs. Freeman said, waving the paper at her assistant and then dropping it back on top of the folder before turning once again to the window.
Mrs. Freeman was conscious of noises behind her, whiny ones that brushed up against her neck and made her shiver, but she found that if she concentrated her attention elsewhere, down into the alley below, for instance, the sound grew less and less irritating until finally it went away.
Mrs. Freeman knew what Arthur wanted to hear, and she could see even in a quick skimming that Tiphany had provided it: denial, obfuscation. But now, turning her gaze west toward the suburbs, in the direction of her home, where her husband was at that moment eating plain yogurt and scanning the newspaper for arcane facts with which to quiz her over dinner, Mrs. Freeman decided that this time she could not, would not, give Arthur the answer he was looking for.
“This particular catastrophe,” she said, addressing the wet, misty interstate overpass outside her window, “is what was once, in more prosaic times, known as ‘collateral damage.’ But in recent years we have begun to think of such casualties as remnants of a primitive past — something akin to raccoon coats and flagpole sitting. We seem to have forgotten that in wars people die, and not because of the quality of our craftsmanship, but because war is distasteful.”
Yes, she thought, she would say that and not a word more. The company expected her to apply a balm, as if with some possible combination of syllables she could return charred schools to their virgin state — as if it were her responsibility, as if she or the company had anything to apologize for. A story might come out in the paper. Stories were always coming out in papers. There would be no point in challenging the facts, which would undoubtedly be correct: sometimes missiles landed where they shouldn’t. Sad? Yes. But scandalous? Not at all. It was simply inevitable, one of the unfortunate costs of war.
Mrs. Freeman recalled a story she had once heard from one of her more philosophically inclined acquaintances — a rare highlight from an otherwise tiresome dinner party. The story was about a Swiss engineer, a man who around the time of the First World War had come to the United States determined to answer the problem of how to drop bombs from airplanes. That is, so the bombs might hit an actual target, rather than landing wherever they might, left to guesswork and chance and the pull of gravity. It was a problem no one until then had managed to solve. The Swiss engineer’s solution, after years of work, involved gyroscopes and gears and more math and physics than Mrs. Freeman could ever hope to understand. But the details were beside the point. The curious piece was the engineer’s motivation: not to win wars, but to do God’s will. He was a good Christian, of the old-fashioned variety. He believed a precise bombsight would reduce human suffering, narrowing destruction only to what needed to be destroyed. And he succeeded, introducing the precision and accuracy no one else could. And yet still one nagging problem remained, then as now: a bombsight depended, above all else, on sight. Over the last decade, HSI’s engineers had developed a drone that could blow the cap off a pop bottle from thirty thousand feet. But first you still had to know where the bottle cap was.
Were it up to Mrs. Freeman, there would be no blowing up of anything. She would let the missiles rust in their weapon bays, deterrents for worst-case scenarios. But as long as there was a need, she felt no guilt about her work; nor could she agree with those cloudy-minded idealists who had begun to pollute the plaza outside the building like so much discarded chewing gum. She would gladly add her name to any list of signatories opposed to armed aggression, but she was no longer naïve enough to believe one could dissolve an army and defend oneself instead with wishful thinking. Arthur might fret and Tiphany plot, but in this case they were beyond reproach, and with nothing left to be resolved, Mrs. Freeman saw no reason to attend to the buzz of her intercom. Let it nag if it wished. She had moved on.
“Your one-fifteen,” cracked a voice over the speakerphone, Tiphany changing tacks.
“Fine,” Mrs. Freeman called over her shoulder. “Send him in.” And in the pause that followed, she caught herself gazing around her office, one of the few habits of her former life she had never managed to break — the need to make sure everything was in order before company arrived. But the place was as it always was, as she had aspired for it to be: good enough. It was not the largest or most impressive room in the building, but Mrs. Freeman had grown tired of offices she couldn’t pace without getting winded. On the day she’d toured the third floor of the newly constructed HSI Building, scouting for the office that would be her hermitage five days a week, Mrs. Freeman had taken only one look out the windows at the front of the building, at the view of a street lined with other office buildings, all that sterile glass like dead shark eyes. That day Mrs. Freeman had determined the proper place for her was as far from all that as she could get, which proved to be a room designated to hold file cabinets, along a forgotten corridor at the back of the building. Her new office had the same full wall of windows as the rest of her colleagues, but hers were shaded, without need for blinds or tints, by the interstate overpass. Here the landscape was of empty billboards and brick walls painted with faded advertisements, all of which, even if they were only remnants, comforted her like a favorite moth-eaten sweater, reminding her of a familiar world, the very industrial wasteland where she’d gotten her start.
With the exception of her office and those belonging to the lowest rung and most unnecessary members of middle management, the rest of the rooms overlooking the alley housed files or hosted meetings with clients and suppliers no one cared to impress. The relative squalor in which Mrs. Freeman worked clearly upset her administrative assistant, whose makeshift desk in the darkest, most out-of-the-way corner of the hallway was degrading and embarrassing and was most likely the catalyst for Tiphany’s designs and ambitions. But Mrs. Freeman felt she had reached an age at which her comfort, as well as her diversions, could deservedly come at someone else’s inconvenience. Surely she had earned that much.
Mrs. Freeman wished now that she had told Tiphany that she wasn’t ready to see her one-fifteen. There were so many things she would rather have been doing than to have to endure yet another meeting, but had Mrs. Freeman tried to tell Tiphany — whose ph always made her bite her lower lip a fraction of a second too long — that she was busy or indisposed or that she needed to reschedule, she knew what the young woman would have said, so well was she conditioned: Wouldn’t it be better to see him now, Ruth, while you have a few minutes, rather than later when you’ll have to work around your afternoon appointments? You have a busy day … Et cetera, et cetera, and, of course, Tiphany would then proceed to remind Mrs. Freeman about some other meeting, which admittedly Mrs. Freeman would also have forgotten, and Tiphany would recall to her some early business dinner with someone named Steve, one of the many Steves with whom Mrs. Freeman was always having to eat an early business dinner. Or if not dinner, it would be the symphony or the ballet with her husband, who would be sullen later were she to stand him up, and all these reminders would be delivered in such a way as to suggest that any change in plans might topple the system altogether.